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Ritsema, Jan
Jan Ritsema (born in the Netherlands in 1945) has directed performances for a wide variety of Dutch and Belgian theatre companies – such as Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Het Werkteater, Het Nationale Toneel, Mug met de gouden Tand‚ tBarre Land, Maatschappij Discordia, Het Kaaitheater, and Dito Dito – ranging from the established repertory (Marlowe, Mishima, Koltes, Shakespeare, Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Rene Pollesch) to staged stories (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Rainer Maria Rilke) as well as performances devised in collaboration with composers, dancers, and artists. With the International Theatre Bookshop, which he founded in 1978, he has published over 300 books about theatre, dance and film.
Since 1995 he has also been working as a dancer, and performed a solo “Pour la fin du temps“ for the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels. He danced in several of Meg Stuart’s improvisational projects called “Crash Landing”; he has also performed danceactions with Boris Charmatz, the duets “Weak Dance Strong Questions” (with Jonathan Burrows) and “Blindspot” (with Sandy Williams).
Ritsema has a predilection for bulky, complex, intellectual material. His theatre productions follow the traces of thinking itself, which in all of its openness, uncertainty and infiniteness demands a consistent ongoing process. Rather than the illusion-producing machine of the theatre, it is the incarnate presentation of differentiated coherences and ideas that intrigues him. His experimental approach is similar to that of the French filmmaker Godard, a director to whom he feels strongly connected. In collaboration with the performer and music-theorist Bojana Cvejic, he weaves his way between the borders of representation and ‘non-performance’ in productions like “TODAYulysses”, “Pipelines, a construction”, and “knowH2Ow”.
Since 2004 Ritsema has had a research and development grant from the Siemens Arts Program, investigating the possibilities and limitations of theatre/performance by interviewing thinkers who have strong reflections on the dispositive ‘theatre’ in today‘s society. These talks are due to be published. Ritsema teaches at different theatre schools for acting and directing in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and at various summer academies throughout Europe. From 1990 until 1995 he was a professor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He has been a teacher at P.A.R.T.S., the contemporary dance school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, since its foundation. In 2006, Ritsema will begin work on PerformingArtsForum (PAF), a residency program in an old convent near the French city of Reims: a place for experimenting with other ways of producing and developing performing-arts pieces, and for rethinking formation in the performing arts (www.kein.org/node/19).
beteiligt an › Mobile Academy in Warsaw: “Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms, and the Places Where They Live”
Jan Ritsema (born in the Netherlands in 1945) has directed performances for a wide variety of Dutch and Belgian theatre companies – such as Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Het Werkteater, Het Nationale Toneel, Mug met de gouden Tand‚ tBarre Land, Maatschappij Discordia, Het Kaaitheater, and Dito Dito – ranging from the established repertory (Marlowe, Mishima, Koltes, Shakespeare, Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Rene Pollesch) to staged stories (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Rainer Maria Rilke) as well as performances devised in collaboration with composers, dancers, and artists. With the International Theatre Bookshop, which he founded in 1978, he has published over 300 books about theatre, dance and film.
Since 1995 he has also been working as a dancer, and performed a solo “Pour la fin du temps“ for the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels. He danced in several of Meg Stuart’s improvisational projects called “Crash Landing”; he has also performed danceactions with Boris Charmatz, the duets “Weak Dance Strong Questions” (with Jonathan Burrows) and “Blindspot” (with Sandy Williams).
Ritsema has a predilection for bulky, complex, intellectual material. His theatre productions follow the traces of thinking itself, which in all of its openness, uncertainty and infiniteness demands a consistent ongoing process. Rather than the illusion-producing machine of the theatre, it is the incarnate presentation of differentiated coherences and ideas that intrigues him. His experimental approach is similar to that of the French filmmaker Godard, a director to whom he feels strongly connected. In collaboration with the performer and music-theorist Bojana Cvejic, he weaves his way between the borders of representation and ‘non-performance’ in productions like “TODAYulysses”, “Pipelines, a construction”, and “knowH2Ow”.
Since 2004 Ritsema has had a research and development grant from the Siemens Arts Program, investigating the possibilities and limitations of theatre/performance by interviewing thinkers who have strong reflections on the dispositive ‘theatre’ in today‘s society. These talks are due to be published. Ritsema teaches at different theatre schools for acting and directing in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and at various summer academies throughout Europe. From 1990 until 1995 he was a professor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He has been a teacher at P.A.R.T.S., the contemporary dance school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, since its foundation. In 2006, Ritsema will begin work on PerformingArtsForum (PAF), a residency program in an old convent near the French city of Reims: a place for experimenting with other ways of producing and developing performing-arts pieces, and for rethinking formation in the performing arts (www.kein.org/node/19).
beteiligt an › Mobile Academy in Warsaw: “Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms, and the Places Where They Live”
